Topic: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

I put my parish's site together a couple of years ago, and it's held together quite well. However, I really think that it's about time it got a refresher. It would be very useful to hear what you think should be improved, and what works. Your help is much appreciated!

http://www.stmarks.on.ca/

Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

First of all, Welcome Neighbour!

Ok, a couple quick comments...
1) on fluid (full-width) layouts such as yours, ride-side menus are out of my visual scan range...
2) on the sermon page, I noticed some font weirdness - turns out that there are some Microsoft Word tags in there. They're also breaking the ATOM/XML feed for that page

Other than that, a very nice site that is, as you say, holding up well!

Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

I would like to see more distinguishing characteristics between sections on the front page and a few strategic photos on the back pages to personalize the site and make the information more inviting.  Good color choices and very readable - I just wanna see y'all. smile

That’s my 2¢.  :^{>

Honored to Serve for Him - Tom ('Mas) Pickering <)><

Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

I'd also like to welcome you.

Not bad for a site that is a couple of years old.

A couple of things that you might improve:

The fluid layout...on a larger monitor with a high resolution (mine is 19in with 1152x864) the line lenths are a bit long on your post. Maybe go with a fixed layout that will work on lower resolutions and reduce line length on higer resolutions. Somewhere around a 750px width.

Second, I like that you have a map on the site. But with Google's Maps API, you should make it interactive. I've used one on Vance Auto. Feel free to dig into the source code and e-mail me with any questions.

Third, jazz up the links on the side menu. What you have now works fine, but I think you could make them better.
Maybe do a little Web 2.0 stuff like a dotted underline, or a highlight.
Or if you want to go completely different check out these resources for more ideas http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/, http://exploding-boy.com/images/EBmenus/menus.html, and http://www.alistapart.com/articles/taminglists/

Overall, the site looks good...I'm anxious to see the updated version.

Last edited by Mithrill (2006-05-01 12:32:32)

He will return...

Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

Mithrill wrote:

Second, I like that you have a map on the site. But with Google's Maps API, you should make it interactive. I've used one on Vance Auto. Feel free to dig into the source code and e-mail me with any questions.

Every church needs a map and/or directions page...  I simply haven't had the time to learn how to use the GMaps API...  perhaps a quick tutorial, Mithrill?

Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

Check out this tutorial. It is pretty helpful, and explains a lot more stuff than I know about the API.
If you still need help after checking the tutorial, let me know and I'll try to write a quick one up explaining the map I used.  I'll need a few days because its finals week at college and I've got a hard database test on Thursday. Just Let me know.

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Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

Thanks for all the advice! I'd definitely considered the interactive map, but was in the same position as Colin. That tutorial will be very useful in working that out, Mithrill! Also good advice on widescreens. I'll use the max-width property to fix that.

Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

I'll write the tutorial then. I just noticed that Google released version 2 of their API on April 3. I'm going to try and update my code to use the Version 2, but it may take me a while to figure everything out. So, I'll write a tutorial for version 1, and if I figure out version 2 I'll write another one. I hope to have the tutorial finished by next Monday. Like I said, its finals week at college. I'll update this post when I upload the tutorial to my new blog.

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Re: St. Mark's Anglican Church, Canada

I finished the tuturial early. You can view it here. The upgrade to version 2 was easier than I thought, so this tutorial uses the newest vesrion.
If you have any qustions, just comment on my blog and I'll try to answer them.
Hope this helps!

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